How Puns Achieve Advertising Effects

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2 外文学院2009—2010学年第(一)学期 2007级英语本科《语言学概论》课程论文 班里编号 26 姓名:LLAAII How Puns Achieve Advertising Effects: A Pragmatic Study of Puns in English Advertisement Abstract: Puns are important rhetorical figures in advertising. As Chinese, we are familiar with puns in Chinese advertisements, while less pay attention to English puns. However, a better understand of puns in English are useful. Based on some previous study and my personal interpretation, this article will focus on analyzing how puns achieve advertising effects in realizing some certain functions of advertisement, with some basis theories and approaches in pragmatics. Key words: pun; advertisement; pragmatic I. Introduction Puns are popular rhetorical vehicles in advertising. Newspapers, TV programmers, WebPages, subways and even outsides our doors — we can find advertisements containing puns everywhere. As a Chinese student, I am familiar with many puns used in Chinese advertisements, for example, “lian tong shi jie,ying zai zhong guo (连通世界,赢在中国),” a advertisement for China Unicom (zhong guo lian tong ). Since they are easy to remember and interesting. As for English advertisements, I can appreciate some figures of speech used in them well, such as repetition, alliteration, contrast. However, just like many other Chinese people, I have some difficulty in understanding some of the puns in English advertisements, because of the culture gap and language gap. In fact, if we can understand them better, we will laugh when we meet them as the native speakers. Therefore, as English major, I will pay more attention to such puns and try to understand them better in order to cross the culture gap and language gap in this aspect. After reading some articles and books, I find the study of the function of puns in English advertisement will not only give us a better understand of puns but

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